dubious little creature

This is Money Snake. She only appears every 312 years. 

Just "photo taken on April 19, 2022 at 8:22 PM." No clues from any of the surrounding pictures. The previous one is me documenting the existence of my grandfather's stuffed pheasant before we get rid of it when we move and the one after it is a 13 second clip of me dumping a bag down our apartment's trash-chute and listening to it fall down all eight floors into the basement.

So I text the number and...

IT WORKED I GOT A SQUID FACT

I'll encourage long fic writers to add on in the notes, but as someone who tends to prefer short and medium-length fic, I'll tell you how I go about it.

Get a premise that you just absolutely love. You're going to be writing this thing for months, if not longer, so you want it to be something you're willing to spend a lot of time thinking about.

Embrace subplots. You'll have your main plotline that you want to see through from beginning to end, but you can also weave in some subplots here or there. The way I do this so that I don't get lost down a rabbit hole is that I always make sure that every chapter has at least 1 thing that moves the main plot forward and then if I want to spend 1-2K with some side characters doing something fun I can do that as well. Subplots can extend for the length of the full narrative, but they can also just last a chapter or three. If you're used to writing short fic, these might give you that familiar feeling of "completion"

A chapter is only as long as it needs to be. Don't get hung up on having a consistent chapter length. Don't get hung up on hitting some arbitrary number every time. Instead, figure out what the next part of your story needs to include and write however many words it takes to get that chunk across. Varying your chapter lengths is a normal thing to do and not something to stress about.

The next thing that I find important personally may or may not be relevant to you, but I find that I can't plot anything in much detail. If I get too into the nitty gritty with my plotting, it just feels like I've already written it. I need to keep it at the level of "And then A and B meet C and hijinks ensue." I can figure out the particular hijinks later. It's the characters meeting up that's the next important thing for me to figure out. Getting too far ahead of myself is a death knell for me in writing long fics, but there are other writers who swear by it. Test out different ways of approaching it and see what works for you.

As someone who tends to write more briefly, another feature that's common to longer fics is more extensive descriptions. People spend time painting visual pictures of the setting or the characters or the actions that are happening. Write the more bare-bones style that focuses more on dialogue (if you're like me) and then go back and read through what you've just written and see if there are opportunities to add in more detail. This can lead to some really interesting characterization choices and also help you out with worldbuilding.

When it comes to worldbuilding, you don't have to get it all on the page. You just need to share what's relevant for the reader in that moment and what is useful to lay out now so that it's already there in a future chapter. You can have an encyclopedic knowledge of how your world works in your head, but it's not actually necessary. No one is going to be quizzing you later - and if they do, you can always figure it out at that point.

plotting can start in many ways. sometimes, it's just a visual, a single line or an image, and a character, that you want to build around. sometimes it's a theme. personally, I find it okay not to worry too much about the methodology, as long as you have an element you really like, whether it be an image or a concrete plotline, just keep asking questions around it that you need to answer: how do they come to this, what are they trying to do? who is involved, and why? where are they? etc. before long, you'll have a plot formed

if you have a plot fic, motivations are important and answering questions about motivations of characters can provide a lot of the meat for subplots! they can also tie multiple aspects of the plot together

thinking about themes and motifs help. sometimes these will come out automatically as you plot, sometimes, thinking about an overarching theme or themes is the action that can unblock you in your fic writing when you get stuck!

fully agree with the point above that adding descriptions can come in at the editing stage :> sometimes, dialogue in itself can carry a huge amount of information and plot forward. not to say that prose cannot be dynamic too, of course, but if you are a writer who has facility with dialogues over prose, dropping plot points in dialogue is also a nice way of keeping it dynamic. it really depends on your writing style

picking the starting point can be hard! some like to start slow, some like to start in medias res... i personally find it helpful to have the whole plot noted down and pick a way to start after a significant chunk of the plot has been jotted down. it gives me more control about what plot points to reveal at any given time

They're fun for your readers and will make them excited because they might remember it in an earlier chapter and be excited that they noticed it, and they're great for you because then if you're stuck, you can go back and read those earlier chapters and you might find a seed in there that will help you figure out whatever's gotten you stuck.